The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Let me be the frist one to sympathise ...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Matt is a coward.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

As if that MATT-ers...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

TRWTF is of course resigning over something like that. It could certainly be the last straw, or the trigger to check other options, and then actually resign for other reasons (like pay, content of work, career prospects, better offer from somewhere else, getting beaten up by co-workers, etc).

But resigning over puns like that is just... WTF.

The whole situation seems more like a career opportunity, if played right, because they certainly needed someone to hold their hand in issues like this.

JiP · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

The problem is not the mathematically proveable correctness of the code, you can do that in several ways and in a way, yes, scientists should be able to write working code.

The problem is that they never seem to know how to use the built-in, usually optimized, gadgets for doing things quicker and/or more efficiently...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

I guess he wasn't the right Matterial for the job.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

You'd think he found a great job. These people obviously need him, right? They'll be thrilled as he ups their productivity tenfold.

But professors -- excuse me, Doctors (they usually hate the teaching part of their job, which is why they turn everything but the credit over to a senior student) -- are a strange breed. When you get your PhD, at that moment you know more than anyone else in the world about one tiny probably meaningless subject that is narrower than a straight pin. This naturally generalizes to knowing more than anyone else in the world about everything else. In particular, you certainly know more than anyone else about writing software.

So I can see leaving because the professors were, well, acting like professors.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Real scientists use LabView.

I's sagaciter!

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

There was just a glitch in the MATT-rix.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

If he'd just stuck it out a little bit longer he could have taken their scientists can code supposition to the Matt. He should have at least waited until a better opportunity Matterialized.

TheEgg · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

There is nothing wrong with "reinventing" virtual memory when your dataset far exceeds your RAM capacity. But most people would simply use an off the shelf database. Mattracle for example.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

    dlmwrite(strcat('\interim data\', num2str(index), '.txt'),data); 
    data = dlmread(strcat('\interim data\', num2str(index), '.txt'));

But wouldn't the compiler just optimize that away?

I have a right to give the computer vague indications of what I want, and it should "just work". That's what I was promised.

TGV · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jimm:
But professors -- excuse me, Doctors (they usually hate the teaching part of their job, which is why they turn everything but the credit over to a senior student) -- are a strange breed. When you get your PhD, at that moment you know more than anyone else in the world about one tiny probably meaningless subject that is narrower than a straight pin.

I don't know why such rancor gets promoted to featured comment. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners. A Ph.D. is not required for odd behavior.

Full disclaimer: I've got one...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Perhaps sticking it out he could have unearthed countless other reinventions of existing concepts. These jobs are usually the most rewarding because can see an alternate timeline of software development. As a developer you get to wear many hats software anthropologist usually provides a lot of humor. Being an archaeologist working in a legacy code base provides an opportunity to examine the mysteries of what this long gone team of developers might have been thinking when they erected a monolithic application. Green field developers have about as much interest and intrigue as a common brick layer.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

TGV:
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners.

In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down. In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors" That at least is accurate, in that the quality of the code they produce is just as poor.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jack:
TGV:
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners.
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down. In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

To be fair, that's only true at a certain scale; individuals can (and do) make total asses of themselves and yet remain employed. Typically, though, that's because there are enough competent people to make up for the moron (usually behind the scenes and without his knowledge). Once a big enough percentage of the business has an IQ below 50, things start heading south; it's just easier to hit that trigger in a startup than in a multi-billion dollar company.

Teaching, on the other hand, appears to be nearly impossible to get yourself fired from. At least it's not quite as bad as Mexico, where until recently they routinely sold and/or inherited teaching positions...

TGV · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jack:
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down. In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

In academia you're guaranteed success? Why did you fail then?

FragFrog · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jack:
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down. In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

You ever heard of 'publish or perish'? It's that fun little aspect of academia where, if your work is not at least as good as everyone else's in the field, you slowly find yourself without a job.

Thought it was hard being better than the dozen or so people in your department? Try being at least as good as thousands of others in your field, all of which have at least an academic degree. Ow, and that screw-up at your last job which nobody will know or care about? Screw up in academia (plagiarize / perform poor research for example) and you best find yourself a new field to work in, because everything you do is public and nobody will want to employ you anymore.

But no, nothing to worry about, the taxpayers will pay you of course!

As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.

dkf · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jack:
In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

Only if you have tenure, and not all tenured positions are paid for by government; private largesse can lead to professors that are equally disconnected from reality. It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)

Frosh · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

This interop probably had something to do with the protein folding simulations that the President's daughter depended on.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.

It's not just you. I'm a US citizen who studied at a US university, and I only met one professor who was even remotely close to this "pointy-headed know it all" stereotype.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Perhaps scientists aren't good at coding because their main concern is understanding whatever type of subatomic physics (or whatever) that they're modeling? Perhaps that's why they hire people just to "to improve the interoperability of their software" ?.

Matt did his job, "it didn’t take long to find the first culprit", and the lab sounded appreciative. If puns are the extent of his despair then I hope Matt's next job involves a superposition of XLST, COBOL, wooden tables and OCR just so he gets some perspective.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jimm:
When you get your PhD, at that moment you know more than anyone else in the world about one tiny probably meaningless subject that is narrower than a straight pin.

An expert is somebody who knows more and more about less and less until he finally knows absolutely everything about absolutely nothing :-)

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Nothing WTF out there. One have to frequently save intermediate data, so that hours of calculations are not lost - the only problem was incorrect settings that made it save them too often...

dgvid · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

The first sentence of the story almost gave me a brain aneurysm. I see stuff like that on regular basis. It's a WTF, but not rare or exceptional.

And don't even think that MATLAB is the worst of it. Allowing a scientist to code in C++ is like giving an espresso and a loaded gun to a 10-year-old.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.

Must be cultural as many professors that I've run into think they know everything, are not that pleasant to other people they work with, and unwilling to help anyone unless it forwards whatever internal political agenda they have (and most of the universities that I've worked at or gone to have tons of internal politics). From what I have been able to gather over the years is that if they insist on being called "doctor", run...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.
It's not just you. I'm a US citizen who studied at a US university, and I only met one professor who was even remotely close to this "pointy-headed know it all" stereotype.

This is what you get when there is constant fundamentalist propaganda that does not believe in evolution or a scientifically explainable/experimentally survivable theory of origin of universe, believes that the usual scientific process of criticism, discussion and arguments show that scientists are lying and wants to discredit science and its teachers so that there can be more illiterate mob that it can feed on.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Anon:
Nothing WTF out there. One have to frequently save intermediate data, so that hours of calculations are not lost - the only problem was incorrect settings that made it save them too often...

We don't even know it is intermediate data. We also don't know whether there were other processes that were reading from this data dump and doing other calculations. Also, in a scientific project, critical data has to be saved for all runs so that future analysis and verification can take place.

TRWTF is eliminating an output without asking anyone whether that output was needed.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Nested for loops in matlab are probably costing nearly as much time as the dlm read/write its self.

matlab is tremendously more efficient when doing tasks across a whole set of data, of when you can convert your loop to matrix form, or even something that operates on a matrix.

For example

a = 1:1000000; for i = a n = n+i; end

would run much slower then this code

a = 1:1000000; sum(a)

Anyways id say loops in matlab are a WTF unless absolutely necessary.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

dgvid:
...It's a WTF, but not rare or exceptional. ...

Hence the title of the site, "The Daily WTF."

FragFrog · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

anon:
From what I have been able to gather over the years is that if they insist on being called "doctor", run...

:) most professors I know insist on being called by their first name. I have never met any that stand on their title. But then again, I only ever interacted with them as a student; possibly the interaction becomes a lot less pleasant when you are hired to do work for them.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

I don't know why such rancor gets promoted to featured comment. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners. A Ph.D. is not required for odd behavior.

Full disclaimer: I've got one...[/quote]

Got what? An Excel diploma? Odd behavior? At least you are forthcoming upfront...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

I for one have never heard anyone in a university department call anyone else "doctor" or "professor" in normal circumstances. The introduction of a prestigious invited speaker at the beginning of a conference presentation is pretty much the only exception I can think of. Even then the title is often eschewed. First-name basis is the norm.

Notes: I can only speak of the habits I observed in France, in Maths and Computer Science departments. Here, everybody is either a doctor or soon will be, so it would be silly to put emphasis on one's PhD, since it's pretty much expected. Perhaps the situation might change in academic environments where PhDs are rarer, if there are such?

anon:
FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.

Must be cultural as many professors that I've run into think they know everything, are not that pleasant to other people they work with, and unwilling to help anyone unless it forwards whatever internal political agenda they have (and most of the universities that I've worked at or gone to have tons of internal politics). From what I have been able to gather over the years is that if they insist on being called "doctor", run...

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Sean:
Anonymous Coward:
FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.
It's not just you. I'm a US citizen who studied at a US university, and I only met one professor who was even remotely close to this "pointy-headed know it all" stereotype.

This is what you get when there is constant fundamentalist propaganda that does not believe in evolution or a scientifically explainable/experimentally survivable theory of origin of universe, believes that the usual scientific process of criticism, discussion and arguments show that scientists are lying and wants to discredit science and its teachers so that there can be more illiterate mob that it can feed on.

And now I paraphrase.

Quote 1: I have a hard time relating. In Europe, professors are awesome.

Quote 2: I have a hard time relating. In America, professors are awesome.

Quote 3: You see, stupid Americans. You get this horrible (professors are awesome) scenario, when fundamentalists don't cow-tow to evolution because it's the only theory that can explain the universe if you immediately assume there's no God, because there can't be a God, because that offends me. And thus, America is stupid.

As far as I can see, a liberal jumped on a rant without reading, because being a hater is what comes naturally.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

I agree that a Ph.D. is not required for odd behavior, but I have to agree after working with many scientists and electrical engineers that they seem to think they know how to program and get very defensive about changing their code. I ran into a very similar situation but it involved a VBA macro running as an entire program inside of Excel that created 1000+ csv's based on a single file input, then a second program written in FORTRAN would read each in and use text files as place holders for information. On a MODERN computer it took 2 weeks to run and would crash half way through, where we would have to dig through 10,000+ lines of text in a log to find what file it died on and remove that file or change the code and recompile to get it to work.

Repeat 1-2 times a month (which was all it could handle).

Then the output was in some format that the engineer thought was the next best thing when he graduated college in 1974 that had to be run through another program to change to CSV again. Then it was manually imported into Excel to create charts to report data findings...

And that is when I rewrote that whole thing. So the point is that ANYONE can have really great bad ideas, but PhD's and EE's are special level of dangerous when it comes to software.

rad131304 · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

It smells of premature optimization, but it's definitely not a WTF - matlab has no intrinsic reference type (e.g. object). Push a non-sparse +1M element double array a couple dozen functions deep and you'll max your memory on your machine pretty quickly since everything gets passed by value.

Matlab does have an abstract "handle" class, which is essentially the object class, but you have to construct your own box/unbox functions before you can use it and then you end up littering your code with

if ~isa(foo, 'box') foo = box(foo); end

and

foo.value

statements.

Addendum (2013-02-26 10:51): Also this:

Rob:
Nested for loops in matlab are probably costing nearly as much time as the dlm read/write its self.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Obnoxious Frog:
I for one have never heard anyone in a university department call anyone else "doctor" or "professor" in normal circumstances. The introduction of a prestigious invited speaker at the beginning of a conference presentation is pretty much the only exception I can think of. Even then the title is often eschewed. First-name basis is the norm.

I only used the title professor if I really admired or respected the person. Otherwise I simply skipped addressing them. For example "I have a question.", instead of "Professor, I have a question.".

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?

I have a degree in CS and I consider myself a Scientist.

I'm not familiar with how it works in the US, is it not the same?

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Sean:
This is what you get when there is constant fundamentalist propaganda that does not believe in evolution or a scientifically explainable/experimentally survivable theory of origin of universe, believes that the usual scientific process of criticism, discussion and arguments show that scientists are lying and wants to discredit science and its teachers so that there can be more illiterate mob that it can feed on.

Don't generalize. The Big Bang theory was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, who happened to be a priest as well as an astronomer and professor.

And so-called "progressives" certainly depend on an illiterate mob to "feed on". Don't believe me? Here's what progressive darling Woodrow Wilson said: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

Nagesh · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

I am called Nag by lot of people. Nag means Snake in Hindi.

Lorne Kates · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

which was making him the butt of countless jokes

So stand up for yourself and tell them you don't appreciate the jokes. Don't let them walk all over you, you friggin' doormatt.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
Matt is a coward.

No, he just got sick of being a door matt.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
It's not just you. I'm a US citizen who studied at a US university, and I only met one professor who was even remotely close to this "pointy-headed know it all" stereotype.

Same here...but in his defense, he really did know it all. Published about 50 papers a year, average, half of them outside his specialty. Easily the smartest guy I ever met.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Expertise is knowing more and more about less and less til you know everything about nothing.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

dkf:
Jack:
In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.
Only if you have tenure, and not all tenured positions are paid for by government; private largesse can lead to professors that are equally disconnected from reality. It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)

Other than the fact that tenured professors have to go up for review every five years to retain it, you're right!

I am considering a position in academia, and was shocked at what it really is (still considering though). Just to let you know, the following is the academic path: 1 - BS, MS, PhD (generally, work like hell, publish or perish, 40 hrs/week for the BS, 60 hrs/week for the PhD) 2 - PostDoc (work like hell, prove you can publish really good things, 60 hrs/week) 3 - Tenure Track (work 60+ hour weeks between Teaching/Service/Research) 4 - The golden Tenure (after minimum 8 years of degree, 2 years of postdoc'ing, and 6 years of tenure track, you age 34, minimum, having spent almost half of your 18-55 working 'career')

Note that "tenure" does not mean "research funding", you have to get that yourself through proposal/grant writing. Also note that tenure only applies to the university where you get it. If you have to move, you may have to start all over again. If that weren't enough, you go up for "Tenure Review" to see if you keep it every 5 years for about the next 20 years, when you get Full Professorship (age 50ish). Also note that even Full Professors work 50-55 hours weeks.

For anyone that thinks that professors are a drain on the taxpayer, please consider: 1 - they are paid virtually nothing during the PhD process (20K/year for only the last MS/PhD portion of the degree) 2 - postdocs pay 60K/year around here (compare this to a SW developer with 5 years experience, who makes 80K) 3 - they have to find money to fund their activities (grants/contracts) 4 - between 30-50% of their time spent working is unpaid 5 - true tenure protection (no further tenure review) is not available until near retirement

Professors are frequently disconnected from the 'business' world (where you have to sell products to make money), but frequently are a bargain for the taxpayer. They have exceptional expertise, available at discounted rates. They frequently negotiate payments poorly, as a byproduct of do doing it infrequently. The delegate work to grad students (who are even more of a bargain). Poor professors (or ones who work <50 hours/week) are replaced with younger/hungrier ones.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Valued Service:
Sean:
Anonymous Coward:
FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.
It's not just you. I'm a US citizen who studied at a US university, and I only met one professor who was even remotely close to this "pointy-headed know it all" stereotype.

This is what you get when there is constant fundamentalist propaganda that does not believe in evolution or a scientifically explainable/experimentally survivable theory of origin of universe, believes that the usual scientific process of criticism, discussion and arguments show that scientists are lying and wants to discredit science and its teachers so that there can be more illiterate mob that it can feed on.

And now I paraphrase.

Quote 1: I have a hard time relating. In Europe, professors are awesome.

Quote 2: I have a hard time relating. In America, professors are awesome.

Quote 3: You see, stupid Americans. You get this horrible (professors are awesome) scenario, when fundamentalists don't cow-tow to evolution because it's the only theory that can explain the universe if you immediately assume there's no God, because there can't be a God, because that offends me. And thus, America is stupid.

As far as I can see, a liberal jumped on a rant without reading, because being a hater is what comes naturally.

Let's see who rants without reading:

In your quotes, you conveniently omit the article itself which is about a scientist which is apparently not as awesome (and which started the whole thing). Granted, it doesn't say whether it's in America, but being English speaking (as can be seen from the jokes), it's likely.
Most scientists do not start from the assumption that there is no God. In fact, most scientists, especially in America, are Christians, but no fundamentalists. I.e. they believe in God, but recognize that not everything written a few millenia ago should be taken as objective truth, but may be influenced by subjective beliefs of their authors, cultural influence, may have been distorted by oral and written tradition and may have been meant metaphorically rather than literally.
He never said "America is stupid". He criticized fundamentalist propaganda. If you equate the two, that's your problem.
I don't know whether or not he's a liberal. If you assume anyone who disagrees with fundamentalists is liberal, that's again your problem. Or if you just use "liberal" as a swearword for anyone you disagree with, that's even more your problem.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Valued Service:
As far as I can see, a liberal jumped on a rant without reading, because being a hater is what comes naturally.

Obvious troll is obvious

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

TGV:
...cum business owners...

Eugh.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

rad131304:
It smells of premature optimization, but it's definitely not a WTF - matlab has no intrinsic reference type (e.g. object). Push a non-sparse +1M element double array a couple dozen functions deep and you'll max your memory on your machine pretty quickly since everything gets passed by value.

Not quite. Yes, Matlab passes by value, but it doesn't create a copy of your matrix until it is modified.

A CSV is as Good as RAM, Right?

Leave a comment on “A CSV is as Good as RAM, Right?”